"As national and international governments endeavor to provide open,
transparent, and trusted services, the challenges of managing citizens'
identities and access to information require careful planning, a
strong policy focus, and attention to standards and interoperability.
The risks, rewards, and repercussions of transparent government will
be explored at Identity Management 2009, an OASIS IDtrust forum that
will be held 29-30 September at the U.S. National Institute for
Standards and Technology (NIST) facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
The OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) Technical
Committee will hold a F2F meeting in conjunction with the Forum."

Identity Management 2009 is sponsored by Microsoft. Lee Nackman,
corporate vice president of the Identity and Security Division at
Microsoft: "Promoting widespread use of secure and trustworthy digital
identities, while preserving personal privacy and protecting civil
liberties, is a critical challenge for governments and the technology
industry. Working with government leaders, industry partners and
consortia like OASIS, Microsoft is committed to the technical and policy
innovation needed to provide citizens with safe access to resources
and services, in both the public and private sectors. Identity
Management 2009 will provide an ideal forum for knowledge sharing and
collaboration in this area."

Object Management Group (OMG), like several other consortia, sponsors
an initiative to define the use of XML namespaces in technical
specifications. The (draft) "Proposal for XML Namespaces in OMG
Specifications" (Version 1) has been prepared for submission to the
OMG Architecture Board.

Summary: "Currently, within the OMG there is no consistency in how
namespaces are defined and associated with XML schemas, XMI documents,
and WSDL documents for OMG Specs. Moving forward, it has been suggested
that the OMG should have a policy for XML Namespaces associated with
OMG specs...

For consistency, the most important aspect of this proposal is that a
URL used for any OMG XML namespace always resolves to a RDDL document
describing that namespace, and that document be in a dated directory
within the file hierarchy associated with the OMG specification which
defines the namespace. The RDDL document is a special type of XHTML
file, which contains explanatory text describing important aspects of
the namespace definition, as well as specialized html links to related
resources...

This proposal specifies a specific policy for URLs used for OMG schema
and WSDL descriptions, which requires that the URL used for an OMG XML
namespace be in a dated directory within the directory of the OMG
specification which defines the namespace. The explanatory text in the
OMG RDDL document for the namespace needs to include the policy used
for defining and versioning the URI used for that namespace. This
proposal includes a draft of the text defining the namespace versioning
policy. The use of a dated URL, rather than a fixed version number,
in a namespace name allows for evolution of the namespace, through
subsequent XSD files which refine the valid productions in that
namespace..."

This revised Internet Draft, published previously under the titles
"Site-Wide Metadata for the Web" and "Host Metadata for the Web,"
defines a path prefix for "well-known locations" in URIs.

From the document Introduction in Defining Well-Known URIs: "It is increasingly common for Web-based
protocols to require the discovery of policy or metadata before making
a request. For example, the Robots Exclusion Protocol specifies a way
for automated processes to obtain permission to access resources;
likewise, the Platform for Privacy Preferences tells user-agents how
to discover privacy policy beforehand.

While there are several ways to access per-resource metadata (e.g., HTTP
headers, WebDAV's PROPFIND (RFC 4918), the perceived overhead associated
with them often precludes their use in these scenarios. When this happens,
it is common to designate a 'well-known location' for such metadata, so
that it can be easily located. However, this approach has the drawback
of risking collisions, both with other such designated 'well-known
locations' and with pre-existing resources.

To address this, this memo defines a path prefix for these 'well-known
locations', '/.well-known/'. Future specifications that need to define
a resource for such site-wide metadata can register their use to avoid
collisions and minimise impingement upon sites' URI space..."

Members of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
Technical Committee have created a new "DITA in Composite Environments
Subcommittee (DiCE)", initially chaired by Seth Park (Freescale
Semiconductor).

According to the published 'Charter for a Proposed OASIS DITA TC
Subcommittee': Many DITA users have expressed the desire to publish
destination formats using content from both DITA and non-DITA data
sources. Some users have implemented this functionality by relying on
specialized processing; however, those solutions are often non-generic,
coded to solve specific issue rather than a general class of the
problem.

The goals of the DiCE Subcommittee are to: (1) Define DITA's role in
a composite data format environment; (2) Establish best practices for
integrating DITA in a composite environment; (3) Provide baseline
processing architecture to enable DITA to participate in composite
environments; (4) Identify and recommend DITA architectural requirements
to enable DITA participation in a composite environment; (5) Determine
the classification of source content types and define supporting DITA
syntax to express the nature and restrictions of the relation. The
DiCE work is intended to enhance interoperability, tool support,
data-driven meaning, and data provider support.

Members of the W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group now invite
implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of "Media Queries." HTML4
and CSS2 "currently support media-dependent style sheets tailored for
different media types. For example, a document may use sans-serif fonts
when displayed on a screen and serif fonts when printed. 'screen' and
'print' are two media types that have been defined. Media queries extend
the functionality of media types by allowing more precise labeling of
style sheets.

A media query consists of a media type and zero or more expressions to
limit the scope of style sheets. Among the media features that can be
used in media queries are 'width', 'height', and 'color'. By using media
queries, presentations can be tailored to a specific range of output
devices without changing the content itself...

This Media Queries specification will exit the CR stage the following
conditions have been met: at least two interoperable implementations
have been created (passing the respective test case in the CSS test
suite); publication of a Test Suite; a minimum of another six months
of the CR period must elapse...

"This document specifies authorization extensions to the Transport Layer
Security (TLS) Handshake Protocol. Transport Layer Security (TLS)
protocol is being used in an increasing variety of operational
environments, including ones that were not envisioned at the time of
the original design for TLS. The extensions introduced in this document
are designed to enable TLS to operate in environments where authorization
information needs to be exchanged between the client and the server
before any protected data is exchanged. The use of these TLS
authorization extensions is especially attractive when more than one
application protocol can make use of the same authorization information.

The format and content of the authorization information carried in
these extensions is extensible. This document references SAML Assertion
and X509 Attribute Certificate authorization formats, but other
formats can be used. Future authorization extensions may include any
opaque assertion that is digitally signed by a trusted issuer.
Recognizing the similarity to certification path validation, this
document recommends the use of TLS Alert messages related to certificate
processing to report authorization information processing failures..."

Although the W3C's XML Pipeline Language (XProc) hasn't even left the
stable yet, people are already looking beyond what it was originally
designed for. Previous threads on the XProc mailing list discussed the
topics of parallel step execution, process orchestration and comparisons
with the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)...

Last year I was involved in the aggregation of results from several term
extraction services; we chose Apache Cocoon to handle the pipeline
processing of requests and transforms. To make our service more efficient
we added a parallel request transformer component that would explicitly
make concurrent requests and merge any results returned within a set
period of time. The act of making explicit concurrent requests improved
the performance of the service considerably...

How do you extend XProc to handle new features like explicit concurrency?
Firstly, XProc is very extensible, you can write extension steps or
extension attributes (in their own namespace) for an implementation.
There's already an EXProc community that has been formed, following in
the footsteps of EXPath and EXSLT, it's job is to co-ordinate extensions
across implementations. It occurred to me, as a result of those
mailing list treads, that there is another rather intriguing possibility.
If you want to dictate the active duration of a pipeline step i.e., when
it starts, how long it runs for, if it should repeat, how often it should
repeat and under what circumstances it should start and stop (step
orchestration) then you could use the W3C's Synchronized Multimedia
Integration Language (SMIL) to describe these types of behaviours..."

"Microsoft has offered users of Windows Live the chance to experiment
with a limited technical preview of Office Web Apps, the online version
of its Office productivity suite. The beta version of Web Apps will be
released at some point during Fall 2009. Microsoft has been developing
stripped-down, browser-accessible versions of its productivity programs
in an attempt to head off challenges from Google Apps and other free
cloud-based applications...

Office Web Apps will support a wide range of browsers, according to
Microsoft, including Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. The
platform will also support previous versions of Office, including 2003,
2007, 2010 and Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. Other functionality
includes the ability for multiple users to simultaneously edit Excel
Web App or OneNote Web App documents from within the browser. A
'Publish' feature lets users push Excel data or PowerPoint presentations
to third-party Websites, blogs or wikis; the embedded portions of those
documents will then be automatically updated whenever a user makes a
change..."

Some screen shots are provided in the InfoWorld article by Neil McAllister: "First Glimpse: Microsoft Office Web Apps. Microsoft's Technical Preview of Web-based Editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Shows that Google is in for a Fight."